"It’s no secret that an enormous amount of party leadership in New York State is based on big money and old-school, calcified machine-style politics that creates a very anemic voting base that is disengaged and disenfranchised."

Said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calling for the resignation of Jay Jacobs, the Democratic Party chairman in NY state.

Quoted in"If Democrats Lose the House, They May Have New York to Blame/Republicans flipped four congressional seats in New York, the most of any state in the country. How did this happen in one of the nation’s most liberal states?" by Nicholas Fandos (NYT).

[M]any progressives... lamented that numerous candidates had failed to stake out a bolder agenda that would inspire the state’s 6.5 million Democrats and to invest in more durable on-the-ground organizing, rather than trying to motivate voters out of fear of [GOP candidate for governor Lee] Zeldin.

"But should representation and abstraction be regarded as ideologies? I don’t think so."

"It’s true that styles have sometimes been given an ideological spin. Hitler and Stalin were doing that when they embraced the art of the figure and banned everything else. Avant-gardists have all too often regarded abstraction as a symbol of human progress. But representation and abstraction—and their almost limitless variations—are anything but ideological absolutes, at least not when they are celebrated by a solitary artistic explorer.... 'Postmodernism' is a term we hear much less than we did twenty years ago, but the postmodern emphasis on a relaxation of artistic dispute—a sense that art history has ended and we are now enjoying a creative free-for-all—is one way of understanding the collapse of representation and abstraction as distinct value systems.... Of course, the problem with belief systems is that they can become sclerotic...." 

From "Between Abstraction and Representation/Artists today think they no longer have to choose between two opposed artistic traditions. But what is being lost in this eclecticism?" by Jed Perl (NYRB).

"Of course, the problem with belief systems is that they can become sclerotic"... and the problem with no beliefs at all is that after a short period of saying things like "postmodernism," nothing seems worth talking about at all. 

Calcification.

I'm reading "Hillary Clinton Accepted Her Loss, but a Lot Has Changed Since 2016" by Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA (NYT).

With both parties nationally viable, victory is always within reach, and this has calcified our politics — making voters less likely to try out the other side and making every election critical.... There is less chance for new or dramatic events — like a global pandemic, a social justice movement or an insurrection — to change people’s minds.... [I]t’s polarization plus....

Calcification has four parts: an increasing similarity among voters within each party in terms of issue positions, ideology and characteristics; an increasing distance between the two parties on these same things; the rise of issues turning on fundamental identities — of race, ethnicity, gender and religion — to the top of voters’ priorities; and the rough partisan balance between Democrats and Republicans in the electorate.